Standard RF receiver design incorporates conversion of incoming high frequency signals to one or more intermediate frequencies, the last of which is then converted to baseband. A mixer and image rejection filter are required at each stage, resulting in complexity proportional to the number of stages. Such complexity is undesirable, particularly for mobile communications applications where size, power consumption, and cost per unit must be minimized.
Various approaches have been taken to reduce the size, power consumption, and cost of receivers. One approach is to perform nearly all of the receiver functions in the discrete-time domain in a DSP (digital signal processor) device. This results in high DSP performance requirements and cost. Other approaches employ discrete-time processing for baseband and for some intermediate frequency operations, reducing the DSP performance requirements, but still requiring at least one high performance continuous-time image rejection filter.
Direct conversion receivers offer a potential alternative for avoiding some of the limitations of other approaches. Receivers of this type employ quadrature mixing directly to baseband. Discrete-time processing can be efficiently utilized at baseband frequencies to demodulate the signal of interest, employing the quadrature baseband signals to utilize the entire signal spectrum centered at baseband. The complex-valued signal comprised of the I, Q samples allows the faithful representation of the signal of interest on both sides of baseband without distortion from images from opposite sides of baseband. Thus only a single continuous-time frequency conversion stage need be employed. No preselecting bandpass filter is required to eliminate an undesired mixing image, so that a broad tuning range is possible.
Despite the above potential advantages, direct conversion receivers also present problems including: (1) 1/f noise, which dominates active devices at low frequencies, particularly below 100 Hz, (2) time-varying DC offsets which can saturate the later stages of the baseband signal chain, (3) products of self-mixing of strong signals which can be present at baseband, (4) relatively small phase and amplitude errors between channels considerably reduce image rejection, and (5) fairly sharp anti-aliasing filters are required and can distort the desired signal if not carefully designed and precisely matched.
These problems are not unique to direct conversion receivers. An example of a receiver that converts to a non-zero intermediate frequency but remains vulnerable to the low-frequency problems listed above is illustrated in FIG. 13 of U.S. Pat. No. 5,875,212 to Fleek et al.
Attempts have been made to provide the advantages of direct conversion without the disadvantages by “notching out” DC from the baseband signal. This method performs well only if the signal type contains little or no information at or near DC. If the notch at DC is sufficiently narrow to minimize loss of information, the problems listed above related to amplification at or near DC are not eliminated.
Attempts have been made to avoid losing the information at and near DC and avoid the need for image rejection by translating a desired channel frequency from a channelized frequency spectrum to a frequency offset a small fixed amount from baseband, with the offset large enough to move the DC portion of the channelized signal into a passband which excludes DC, but small enough to prevent the next adjacent channel from appearing in the passband. This technique may preserve the DC portion of the signal, but requires sharp cut-off highpass and anti-aliasing filters and, because of the proximity of the passband to DC, still suffers somewhat from the other problems listed above.
Another known approach has been to perform image-rejection downconversion of an RF tuning range to a relatively wide intermediate frequency range with a local oscillator having no specified relationship to frequencies of RF channels within the tuning range. For example, W. Baumberger in “A Single-Chip Image Rejecting Receiver for the 2.44 GHz Band Using Commercial GaAs-MESFET-Technology” discloses the use of a 150-MHz intermediate frequency range (from 130 to 280 MHz) in a receiver having a tuning range on the order of 500 MHz. Another example is found in Published EPO Application 0 651 522 by M. Pesola, in which FIG. 3 illustrates the use of two radio frequency bands on opposite side of a local oscillator frequency, selected using either one of the outputs of a mixer attenuating the image frequency. Pesola also discloses the use of intermediate frequencies having widths of 100 kHz and 1 MHz, and a relatively high frequency of 100 MHz, with image-rejection downconversion using a channel-dependent local oscillator. This disclosed arrangement suffers from the inefficient use of a relatively high intermediate frequency (on the order of 100–1000 times the bandwidth).